This familiar name is comparatively modern, but Caledonia is ancient and poetical. The Roman poet Lucan, in A.D. 64, makes use of the term, and in Roman writers we find that there existed a district, a forest, and a tribe, each bearing the name “Caledonia,” and spoken of by Ptolemy. The first Latin invasion was under Agricola, about A.D. 83, and a decisive battle was fought, according to his son-in-law, Tacitus, on the slopes of Mons Graupius, a range of hills which in modern days is known as the “Grampian Hills.” To our childish imagination, “Norval” whose father fed his flock on these heathery heights, was more of a living hero than was the mighty Roman. Of Agricola’s wall, strengthened with a line of forts, there are remains still standing, and two of these strongholds, at Camelon and Barhill, have been identified and excavated. Perhaps the most northerly of the ascertained Roman encampments in Scotland is at Inchtuthill. Where the Tay and Isla Rivers join their waters-- “Rome the Empress of the world, Of yore her eagle wings unfurled.” The Romans left the country and did not enter it again until A.D. 140, when the wall of Antoninus Pius was built, from sea to sea, and other forts erected. It was on pillared crags and prow-like headlands, between the North and South Tynes, along the verge of which the Romans carried their boundary of stone. The Caledonians remained unconquered and regained full possession of their soil, about A.D. 180. Then the Emperor Septimus Severus invaded the land, but after his death the Roman writ never ran again north of the Cheviot Hills. Summing up the whole matter, the Latin occupation was military, without effect on Caledonian civilization, so that the people of this Celtic northland were left to work out their own evolution without Roman influence and under the ægis of Christianity. If we may trust our old friend Lemprière (1765–1824), of Classical Dictionary fame,--the second edition of whose useful manual furnished, to a clerk in Albany, the Greek and Latin names which he shot, like grape and canister, over the “Military Tract,” in New York State, surveyed by Simeon DeWitt,--we may get light on the meaning of “Caledonia” and “Scot.” The former comes from “Kaled,” meaning “rough”; hence the “Caledonii,” “the rude nation,”--doubtless an opinion held mutually of one another by the Romans and their opponents. The term survives in the second syllable of Dunkeld. “Pict,” or “pecht,” is stated to mean “freebooters.” “Scot” means “allied,” or in “union,” and the Scots formed a united nation. Another author traces Caledonia to the term “Gael-doch,” meaning “the country of the Gael,” or the Highlander.